[01] The great problem, of which these
recurring seasons of industrial depression are but peculiar manifestations,
is now, I think, fully solved, and the social phenomena which
all over the civilized world appall the philanthropist and perplex
the statesman, which hang with clouds the future of the most advanced
races, and suggest doubts of the reality and ultimate goal of
what we have fondly called progress, are now explained.
[02] The reason why, in spite of the increase
of productive power, wages constantly tend to a minimum which
will give but a bare living, is that, with increase in productive
power, rent tends to even greater increase, thus producing a constant
tendency to the forcing down of wages.
[03] In every direction, the direct tendency
of advancing civilization is to increase the power of human labor
to satisfy human desires -- to extirpate poverty, and to banish
want and the fear of want. All the things in which progress consists,
all the conditions which progressive communities are striving
for, have for their direct and natural result the improvement
of the material (and consequently the intellectual and moral)
condition of all within their influence. The growth of population,
the increase and extension of exchanges, the discoveries of science,
the march of invention, the spread of education, the improvement
of government, and the amelioration of manners, considered as
material forces, have all a direct tendency to increase the productive
power of labor -- not of some labor, but of all labor; not in
some departments of industry, but in all departments of industry;
for the law of the production of wealth in society is the law
of "each for all, and all for each."
[04] But labor cannot reap the benefits
which advancing civilization thus brings, because they are intercepted.
Land being necessary to labor, and being reduced to private ownership,
every increase in the productive power of labor but increases
rent -- the price that labor must pay for the opportunity to utilize
its powers; and thus all the advantages gained by the march of
progress go to the owners of land, and wages do not increase.
Wages cannot increase; for the greater the earnings of labor the
greater the price that labor must pay out of its earnings for
the opportunity to make any earnings at all. The mere laborer
has thus no more interest in the general advance of productive
power than the Cuban slave has in advance in the price of sugar.
And just as an advance in the price of sugar may make the condition
of the slave worse, by inducing the master to drive him harder,
so may the condition of the free laborer be positively, as well
as relatively, changed for the worse by the increase in the productive
power of his labor. For, begotten of the continuous advance of
rents, arises a speculative tendency which discounts the effect
of future improvements by a still further advance of rent, and
thus tends, where this has not occurred from the normal advance
of rent, to drive wages down to the slave point -- the point at
which the laborer can just live.
[05] And thus robbed of all the benefits
of the increase in productive power, labor is exposed to certain
effects of advancing civilization which, without the advantages
that naturally accompany them, are positive evils, and of themselves
tend to reduce the free laborer to the helpless and degraded condition
of the slave.
[06] For all improvements which add to
productive power as civilization advances consist in, or necessitate,
a still further subdivision of labor, and the efficiency of the
whole body of laborers is increased at the expense of the independence
of the constituents. The individual laborer acquires knowledge
of and skill in but an infinitesimal part of the varied processes
which are required to supply even the commonest wants. The aggregate
produce of the labor of a savage tribe is small, but each member
is capable of an independent life. He can build his own habitation,
hew out or stitch together his own canoe, make his own clothing,
manufacture his own weapons, snares, tools and ornaments. He has
all the knowledge of nature possessed by his tribe -- knows what
vegetable productions are fit for food, and where they may be
found; knows the habits and resorts of beasts, birds, fishes,
and insects; can pilot himself by the sun or the stars, by the
turning of blossoms or the mosses on the trees; is, in short,
capable of supplying all his wants. He may be cut off from his
fellows and still live; and thus possesses an independent power
which makes him a free contracting party in his relations to the
community of which he is a member.
[07] Compare with this savage the laborer
in the lowest ranks of civilized society, whose life is spent
in producing but one thing, or oftener but the infinitesimal part
of one thing, out of the multiplicity of things that constitute
the wealth of society and go to supply even the most primitive
wants; who not only cannot make even the tools required for his
work, but often works with tools that he does not own, and can
never hope to own. Compelled to even closer and more continuous
labor than the savage, and gaining by it no more than the savage
gets -- the mere necessaries of life -- he loses the independence
of the savage. He is not only unable to apply his own powers to
the direct satisfaction of his own wants, but, without the concurrence
of many others, he is unable to apply them indirectly to the satisfaction
of his wants. He is a mere link in an enormous chain of producers
and consumers, helpless to separate himself, and helpless to move,
except as they move. The worse his position in society, the more
dependent is he on society; the more utterly unable does he become
to do anything for himself. The very power of exerting his labor
for the satisfaction of his wants passes from his own control,
and may be taken away or restored by the actions of others, or
by general causes over which he has no more influence than he
has over the motions of the solar system. The primeval curse comes
to be looked upon as a boon, and men think, and talk, and clamor,
and legislate as though monotonous manual labor in itself were
a good and not an evil, an end and not a means. Under such circumstances,
the man loses the essential quality of manhood -- the godlike
power of modifying and controlling conditions. He becomes a slave,
a machine, a commodity -- a thing, in some respects, lower than
the animal.
[08] I am no sentimental admirer of the
savage state. I do not get my ideas of the untutored children
of nature from Rousseau, or Chateaubriand, or Cooper. I am conscious
of its material and mental poverty, and its low and narrow range.
I believe that civilization is not only the natural destiny of
man, but the enfranchisement, elevation, and refinement of all
his powers, and think that it is only in such moods as may lead
him to envy the cud -- chewing cattle, that a man who is free
to the advantages of civilization could look with regret upon
the savage state. But, nevertheless, I think no one who will open
his eyes to the facts can resist the conclusion that there are
in the heart of our civilization large classes with whom the veriest
savage could not afford to exchange. It is my deliberate opinion
that if, standing on the threshold of being, one were given the
choice of entering life as a Tierra del Fuegan, a black fellow
of Australia, an Esquimau in the Arctic Circle, or among the lowest
classes in such a highly civilized country as Great Britain, he
would make infinitely the better choice in selecting the lot of
the savage. For those classes who in the midst of wealth are condemned
to want, suffer all the privations of the savage, without his
sense of personal freedom; they are condemned to more than his
narrowness and littleness, without opportunity for the growth
of his rude virtues; if their horizon is wider, it is but to reveal
blessings that they cannot enjoy.
[09] There are some to whom this may seem
like exaggeration, but it is only because they have never suffered
themselves to realize the true condition of those classes upon
whom the iron heel of modern civilization presses with full force.
As De Tocqueville observes, in one of his letters to Mme. Swetchine,
"we so soon become used to the thought of want that we do not
feel that an evil which grows greater to the sufferer the longer
it lasts becomes less to the observer by the very fact of its
duration"; and perhaps the best proof of the justice of this observation
is that in cities where there exists a pauper class and a criminal
class, where young girls shiver as they sew for bread, and tattered
and barefooted children make a home in the streets, money is regularly
raised to send missionaries to the heathen! Send missionaries
to the heathen! It would be laughable if it were not so sad. Baal
no longer stretches forth his hideous, sloping arms; but in Christian
lands mothers slay their infants for a burial fee! And I challenge
the production from any authentic accounts of savage life of such
descriptions of degradation as are to be found in official documents
of highly civilized countries -- in reports of sanitary commissioners
and of inquiries into the condition of the laboring poor.
[10] The simple theory which I have outlined
(if indeed it can be called a theory which is but the recognition
of the most obvious relations) explains this conjunction of poverty
with wealth, of low wages with high productive power, of degradation
amid enlightenment, of virtual slavery In political liberty. It
harmonizes, as results flowing from a general and inexorable law,
facts otherwise most perplexing, and exhibits the sequence and
relation between phenomena that without reference to it are diverse
and contradictory. It explains why interest and wages are higher
in new than in older communities, though the average, as well
as the aggregate, production of wealth is less. It explains why
improvements which increase the productive power of labor and
capital increase the reward of neither. It explains what is commonly
called the conflict between labor and capital, while proving the
real harmony of interest between them. It cuts the last inch of
ground from under the fallacies of protection, while showing why
free trade fails to benefit permanently the working classes. It
explains why want increases with abundance, and wealth tends to
greater and greater aggregations. It explains the periodically
recurring depressions of industry without recourse either to the
absurdity of "overproduction" or the absurdity of "overconsumption."
It explains the enforced idleness of large numbers of wouldbe
producers, which wastes the productive force of advanced communities,
without the absurd assumption that there is too little work to
do or that there are too many to do it. It explains the ill effects
upon the laboring classes which often follow the introduction
of machinery, without denying the natural advantages which the
use of machinery gives. It explains the vice and misery which
show themselves amid dense population, without attributing to
the laws of the All-Wise and All-Beneficent defects which belong
only to the shortsighted and selfish enactments of men.
[11] This explanation is in accordance
with all the facts.
[12] Look over the world today. In countries
the most widely differing -- under conditions the most diverse
as to government, as to industries, as to tariffs, as to currency
-- you will find distress among the working classes; but everywhere
that you thus find distress and destitution in the midst of wealth
you will find that the land is monopolized; that instead of being
treated as the common property of the whole people, it is treated
as the private property of individuals; that, for its use by labor,
large revenues are extorted from the earnings of labor. Look over
the world today, comparing different countries with each other,
and you will see that it is not the abundance of capital or the
productiveness of labor that makes wages high or low; but the
extent to which the monopolizers of land can, in rent, levy tribute
upon the earnings of labor. Is it not a notorious fact, known
to the most ignorant, that new countries, where the aggregate
wealth is small, but where land is cheap, are always better countries
for the laboring classes than the rich countries, where land is
dear? Wherever you find land relatively low, will you not find
wages relatively high? And wherever land is high, will you not
find wages low? As land increases in value, poverty deepens and
pauperism appears. In the new settlements, where land is cheap,
you will find no beggars, and the inequalities in condition are
very slight. In the great cities, where land is so valuable that
it is measured by the foot, you will find the extremes of poverty
and of luxury. And this disparity in condition between the two
extremes of the social scale may always be measured by the price
of land. Land in New York is more valuable than San Francisco;
and in New York, the San Franciscan may see squalor and misery
that will make him stand aghast. Land is more valuable in London
than in New York; and in London, there is squalor and destitution
worse than that of New York.
[13] Compare the same country in different
times, and the same relation is obvious. As the result of much
investigation, Hallam says he is convinced that the wages of manual
labor were greater in amount in England during the Middle Ages
than they are now. Whether this is so or not, it is evident that
they could not have been much, if any, less. The enormous increase
in the efficiency of labor, which even in agriculture is estimated
at seven or eight hundred per cent., and in many branches of industry
is almost incalculable, has only added to rent. The rent of agricultural
land in England is now, according to Professor Rogers, 120 times
as great, measured in money, as it was 500 years ago, and 14 times
as great, measured in wheat; while in the rent of building land,
and mineral land, the advance has been enormously greater. According
to the estimate of Professor Fawcett, the capitalized rental value
of the land of England now amounts £4,500,000,000, or $21,870,000,000
-- that is to say, a few thousand of the people of England hold
a lien upon the labor of the rest, the capitalized value of which
is more than twice as great as, at the average price of southern
Negroes in 1860, would be the value of her whole population were
they slaves.
[14] In Belgium and Flanders, in France
and Germany, the rent and selling price of agricultural land have
doubled within the last thirty years.1
In short, increased power of production has everywhere added to
the value of land; nowhere has it added to the value of labor;
for though actual wages may in some places have somewhat risen,
the rise is clearly attributable to other causes. In more places
they have fallen -- that is, where it has been possible for them
to fall -- for there is a minimum below which laborers cannot
keep up their numbers. And, everywhere, wages, as a proportion
of the produce, have decreased.
[15] How the Black Death brought about
the great rise of wages in England in the fourteenth century is
clearly discernible, in the efforts of the landholders to regulate
wages by statute. That that awful reduction in population, instead
of increasing, really reduced the effective power of labor, there
can be no doubt; but the lessening of competition for land still
more greatly reduced rent, and wages advanced so largely that
force and penal laws were called in to keep them down. The reverse
effect followed the monopolization of land that went on in England
during the reign of Henry VIII, in the inclosure of commons and
the division of the church lands between the panders and parasites
who were thus enabled to found noble families. The result was
the same as that to which a speculative increase in land values
tends. According to Malthus (who, in his Principles of Political
Economy, mentions the fact without connecting it with land tenures),
in the reign of Henry VII, half a bushel of wheat would purchase
but little more than a day's common labor, but in the latter part
of the reign of Elizabeth, half a bushel of wheat would purchase
three days' common labor. I can hardly believe that the reduction
in wages could have been so great as this comparison would indicate;
but that there was a reduction in common wages, and great distress
among the laboring classes, is evident from the complaints of
"sturdy vagrants" and the statutes made to suppress them. The
rapid monopolization of the land, the carrying of the speculative
rent line beyond the normal rent line, produced tramps and paupers,
just as like effects from like causes have lately been evident
in the United States.
[16] "Land which went heretofore for twenty
or forty pounds a year," said Hugh Latimer, "now is let for fifty
or a hundred. My father was a yeoman, and had no lands of his
own; only he had a farm at a rent of three or four pounds by the
year at the uttermost, and thereupon he tilled so much as kept
half a dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother
milked thirty kine; he was able and did find the King a harness
with himself and his horse when he came to the place that he should
receive the King's wages. I can remember that I buckled his harness
when he went to Blackheath Field. He kept me to school; he married
my sisters with five pounds apiece, so that he brought them up
in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his neighbors
and some alms he gave to the poor. And all this he did of the
same farm, where he that now hath it payeth sixteen pounds rent
or more by year, and is not able to do anything for his Prince,
for himself, nor his children, nor to give a cup of drink to the
poor."
[17] "In this way," said Sir Thomas More,
referring to the ejectment of small farmers which characterized
this advance of rent, "it comes to pass that these poor wretches,
men, women, husbands, orphans, widows, parents with little children,
householders greater in number than in wealth, all of these emigrate
from their native fields, without knowing where to go."
[18] And so from the stuff of the Latimers
and Mores from the sturdy spirit that amid the flames of the Oxford
stake cried, "Play the man, Master Ridley!" and the mingled strength
and sweetness that neither prosperity could taint nor the ax of
the executioner abash -- were evolved thieves and vagrants, the
mass of criminality and pauperism that still blights the innermost
petals and preys a gnawing worm at the root of England's rose.
[19] But it were as well to cite historical
illustrations of the attraction of gravitation. The principle
is as universal and as obvious. That rent must reduce wages, is
as clear as that the greater the subtractor the less the remainder.
That rent does reduce wages, any one, wherever situated, can see
by merely looking around him.
[20] There is no mystery as to the cause
which so suddenly and so largely raised wages in California in
1849, and in Australia in 1852. It was the discovery of the placer
mines in unappropriated land to which labor was free that raised
the wages of cooks in San Francisco restaurants to $500 a month,
and left ships to rot in the harbor without officers or crew until
their owners would consent to pay rates that in any other part
of the globe seemed fabulous. Had these mines been on appropriated
land, or had they been immediately monopolized so that rent could
have arisen, it would have been land values that would have leaped
upward, not wages. The Comstock lode has been richer than the
placers, but the Comstock lode was readily monopolized, and it
is only by virtue of the strong organization of the Miners' Association
and the fears of the damage which it might do, that enables men
to get four dollars a day for parboiling themselves two thousand
feet underground, where the air that they breathe must be pumped
down to them. The wealth of the Comstock lode has added to rent.
The selling price of these mines runs up into hundreds of millions,
and it has produced individual fortunes whose monthly returns
can be estimated only in hundreds of thousands, if not in millions.
Nor is there any mystery about the cause which has operated to
reduce wages in California from the maximum of the early days
to very nearly a level with wages in the eastern states, and that
is still operating to reduce them. The productiveness of labor
has not decreased, on the contrary it has increased, as I have
before shown; but, out of what it produces labor has now to pay
rent. As the placer deposits were exhausted, labor had to resort
to the deeper mines and to agricultural land, but monopolization
of these being permitted, men now walk the streets of San Francisco
ready to go to work for almost anything -- for natural opportunities
are now no longer free to labor.
[21] The truth is self-evident. Put to
any one capable of consecutive thought this question:
[22] "Suppose there should arise from the
English Channel or the German Ocean a no man's land on which common
labor to an unlimited amount should be able to make ten shillings
a day and which should remain unappropriated and of free access,
like the commons which once comprised so large a part of English
soil. What would be the effect upon wages in England?"
[23] He would at once tell you that common
wages throughout England must soon increase to ten shillings a
day.
[24] And in response to another question,
"What would be the effect on rents?" he would at a moment's reflection
say that rents must necessarily fall; and if he thought ,out the
next step he would tell you that all this would happen without
any very large part of English labor being diverted to the new
natural opportunities, or the forms and direction of industry
being much changed; only that kind of production being abandoned
which now yields to labor and to landlord together less than labor
could secure on the new opportunities. The great rise in wages
would be at the expense of rent.
[25] Take now the same man or another --
some hardheaded business man, who has no theories, but knows how
to make money. Say to him: "Here is a little village; in ten years
it will be a great city -- in ten years the railroad will have
taken the place of the stage coach, the electric light of the
candle; it will abound with all the machinery and improvements
that so enormously multiply the effective power of labor. Will,
in ten years, interest be any higher?"
[26] He will tell you, "No!"
[27] "Will the wages of common labor be
any higher; will it be easier for a man who has nothing but his
labor to make an independent living?"
[28] He will tell you, "No; the wages of
common labor will not be any higher; on the contrary, all the
chances are that they will be lower; it will not be easier for
the mere laborer to make an independent living; the chances are
that it will be harder."
[29] "What, then, will be higher?"
[30] "Rent; the value of land. Go, get
yourself a piece of ground, and hold possession."
[31] And if, under such circumstances,
you take his advice, you need do nothing more. You may sit down
and smoke your pipe; you may lie around like the lazzaroni of
Naples or the leperos of Mexico; you may go up in a balloon, or
down a bole in the ground; and without doing one stroke of work,
without adding one iota to the wealth of the community, in ten
years you will be rich! In the new city you may have a luxurious
mansion; but among its public buildings will be an almshouse.
[32] In all our long investigation we have
been advancing to this simple truth: That as land is necessary
to the exertion of labor in the production of wealth, to command
the land which is necessary to labor, is to command all the fruits
of labor save enough to enable labor to exist. We have been advancing
as through an enemy's country, in which every step must be secured,
every position fortified, and every bypath explored; for this
simple truth, in its application to social and political problems,
is hid from the great masses of men partly by its very simplicity,
and in greater part by widespread fallacies and erroneous habits
of thought which lead them to look in every direction but the
right one for an explanation of the evils which oppress and threaten
the civilized world. And back of these elaborate fallacies and
misleading theories is an active, energetic power, a power that
in every country, be its political forms what they may, writes
laws and molds thought -- the power of a vast and dominant pecuniary
interest.
[33] But so simple and so clear is this
truth, that to see it fully once is always to recognize It. There
are pictures which, though looked at again and again, present
only a confused labyrinth of lines or scroll work -- a landscape,
trees, or something of the kind -- until once the attention is
called to the fact that these things make up a face or a figure.
This relation once recognized, is always afterward clear. It is
so in this case. In the light of this truth all social facts group
themselves in an orderly relation, and the most diverse phenomena
are seen to spring from one great principle. It is not in the
relations of capital and labor; it is not in the pressure of population
against subsistence, that an explanation of the unequal development
of our civilization is to be found. The great cause of inequality
in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of
land. The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which
ultimately determines the social, the political, and consequently
the intellectual and moral condition of a people. And it must
be so. For land is the habitation of man, the storehouse upon
which he must draw for all his needs, the material to which his
labor must be applied for the supply of all his desires; for even
the products of the sea cannot be taken, the light of the sun
enjoyed, or any of the forces of nature utilized, without the
use of land or its products. On the land we are born, from it
we live, to it we return again -- children of the soil as truly
as is the blade of grass or the flower of the field. Take away
from man all that belongs to land, and he is but a disembodied
spirit. Material progress cannot rid us of our dependence upon
land; it can but add to the power of producing wealth from land;
and hence, when land is monopolized, it might go on to infinity
without increasing wages or improving the condition of those who
have but their labor. It can but add to the value of land and
the power which its possession gives. Everywhere, in all times,
among all peoples, the possession of land is the base of aristocracy,
the foundation of great fortunes, the source of power. As said
the Brahmins, ages ago
[34] "To whomsoever the soil at any time
belongs, to him belong the fruits of it. White parasols and elephants
mad with pride are the flowers of a grant of land."
